1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to mobile devices, and more specifically relates to using mobile devices in a cloud computing environment and deploying mobile workloads to the devices based on proximity of a resource.
2. Background Art
Cloud computing has become an area of emphasis for software and website providers. Cloud computing is a general term for presenting computation, software, data access, and storage services in a manner that the end-user has no knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. With the proliferation of mobile devices, it has been recognized in the prior art that mobile devices may exchange data with devices in the cloud. However, nothing in the prior art shows using mobile devices as compute elements in the cloud.
The mobile nature of mobile devices presents a unique challenge to incorporating mobile devices as compute members in the cloud, because movement of a mobile device may affect the ability of the mobile device to complete a task. For example, if an employee's mobile phone is used to run a task that requires access to the company's network, and if the employee then leaves for lunch, taking his or her mobile phone away from the company's network, the task will not complete. Thus, the unique nature of mobile devices requires deployment of workloads to mobile devices in ways not known in the prior art that account for the movement of mobile devices so the mobile devices can participate as compute members in a cloud computing environment.